Why I Teach

I’m only good at a few things. I’m good at parallel parking, I can cook, I can ski, and I can teach. I like to tell stories and explain abstract ideas; it’s a good thing that the only viable job offer I got after college was teaching because I wouldn’t have adapted so well to other professions.

When I was in high school, I hung out with the other academic nerds. I didn’t know the jocks, I didn’t know the partiers, I didn’t know anyone with low SAT scores. Perhaps I had to return to high school to learn about this important phase of life that I had missed out on.

I teach because I feel empathy for kids who are stuck in classrooms for hours and years. I see my calling as making the best of this bad situation. Neither teachers nor students want to spend their days struggling to master difficult new concepts. It’s a prison sentence, and schools are where we lock up our youth.

Being a high school student taught me incredible patience; while pretending to focus on academics I doodled and watched the clock tic down the minutes until class ended, and I could start counting down how much time was left in the next class, and so on. It felt like I had been running hard on a treadmill only to look up and see that I had barely made 1/10 of a mile and had 4.9 to go.

My goal as a teacher is to make the time go quickly. To do this I have to be emotionally invested in my subject and my students. I have to sell math as an incredible invention of intellectual history, and students have to know that their education matters to me. I believe that I can design lessons for students to learn the most complex concepts. I also believe that confused and frustrated students can derail a class.

My mission is to anticipate the intellectual hurdles that could discourage kids, and teach in a way that minimizes the fear of learning something difficult.

I reject the idea that school can either be easy and fun or painful and challenging. I believe that abstract ideas are stimulating, and that mental stimulation is one of life’s greatest joys. I want my classes to be hard and fun. It’s my job to make the fun part explicit. Students don’t feel satisfied with an easy A, they need to feel a sense of accomplishment. My job is to finesse them into seeing the power of their own minds.

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This week’s essay

Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, lawyer Djenita Pasic enjoyed the peace of her religiously diverse country. But after the fall of communism and the outbreak of the Bosnian War, Pasic was forced to reevaluate her ideas about religion and tolerance. Click here to read her essay.